Tiny Speakers Tiny Demo

An inexpensive recording trick to expand your sound

Besides being cute as hell, little speakers paired with your guitar head can open up a world of new sounds for your recordings.

I remember the first time I discovered how much your choice of speaker, and the cabinet that you put that speaker in, would impact your sound. John (the other guitarist in Deerhoof) and I went down to our practice space and brought along every guitar speaker and cabinet that we owned. Celestion, Electro-Voice, Jensen speakers and more, along with a pile of different sized speaker cabinets, both open and closed-back. We spent the night mixing and matching them all until we finally found the combinations that worked the best with our amp heads of choice. Despite having a variety of vintage and more expensive speakers, what sounded the best for my set up was a cheaper Carvin speaker in a tiny Polytone Mini Brute single 12” extension cabinet. John and I were surprised at the range of differing results we heard with this experiment and we were left a little overwhelmed. Oh, great! Another variable in finding our sounds that we have to think about!

Once I began recording on my own, I remembered this lesson I had learned. I set up my amp wall where I could mix and match every head to every speaker cabinet. I bought six foot speaker cables to so that I wouldn’t have to move anything and could try the combinations easier.

When I record, I regularly like to have a wild card element. Some examples of that would be using a microphone placed in a weird location, running a mic through guitar pedals, using small odd mics I find at thrift stores or recording through the microphone on old cassette recorders.